@ferdinand said in Can a plugin use the native Node Editor for its own graph?:

Hey,

sorry for the delay. I checked and it is not possible to have arbitrary node systems, i.e., node systems that are neither scene nor material nodes. In the backed of things, you actually have almost all you need, so you could implement a node system that outputs sound files for example. One of the major hurdles is that this menu is hard-coded at the moment:

So, there is no way to display your node system of a custom node space purpose type.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

I did manage to add a space to the dropdowns but couldnt connect the viewer to that. although it was only accessible from the top shelf menu Render/node space.

Hey Ferdinand.

thanks for replying.
i actually digged into the documents and tried different AI to find a solution for this but in the end i ended up using HTML for the node canvas and tried to keep the visuals as close as possible to cinema itself in order to keep it familiar for user.

here is a screenshot of you it is right now!

and here is the quick intro to what im doing.

as a long time user of cinema i realized there is something missing at least for my own pipeline and that is the dependency graph. sometimes i either recieve a file or i open an old file that i dont remember what i did exactly and even naming is not that clear to me to figure what is connected to what so i made this dependecy scanner/viewer. basically you select object/s and it shows how adn where its been used or used by!

Is there a public Cinema 4D SDK API for displaying a plugin-defined graph in the native Node Editor, with custom nodes, ports, and connections, independently of the built-in material and Scene Nodes graphs?
I found NodeSpaceInterface, NodeSystemClassInterface, NodesGraphModelRef, and NimbusBaseInterface, but I’m unclear which API provides the graph host and Node Editor context for an independent plugin graph. Is this supported in Cinema 4D 2026, and is there an SDK example of the required registration and host setup?